^{at the Keesler AFB Post Exchange in 1987 (Biloxi, Mississippi)}

No one looked after me or my brother back then, no CPS, 
no Social Workers, the SP’s couldn’t be trusted,
the off-base cops even worse.

When the P-EX mini-mart clerk told me
I wasn’t supposed to be there
and had to leave my Pork & Beans

and bread on the counter, you caught up to me in the parking lot,
my items in your tote bag.
I got caught stealing a sleeved stick of butter

the week prior, but today had returned
with the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin I found in the gutter.
All I had was that and my pocketknife for opening cans and gutting fish,

the reason my privileges were revoked.
I wish I had answered your questions—What’s going on?
Why can’t you shop here? Where are your parents?

before darting off into the night with the can and bread,
dropping the piece of money at your feet.

I come from the kidnapped,
                                    the assaulted––
my country’tis of reparations as in-store credit
                                    backordered to bankruptcy

It is me & my trophy wife
passing as a dream of some kind

All I want is 40 dead mules
& an acre of land w/ a lighthouse
              right above the porch of the great Atlantic Ocean
              just in case any of my ancestors tasted nasty & made it.

I come from a people who pay a penalty every sunrise
& divinate to paroled gods with rancid hog maws.

The stripes plowed into my grandfather’s back
will have to stand in for our family album.

Somebody threw some stars at my grand-momma’s head
& said ‘betcha won’t ask for no freedom no mo’!

Natives in prison-issue war bonnets say:
I come from a poisoned land that recycles children
           into artillery shells
                      & where dark skin is good as
                                 an invisibility cloak

            until the police arrive.

I am proud to be a _____________
where I can hold my head up and drown
in the downpour of state sanctioned cancer.

I am proud to hold my place
in back of the line.

I come from a land that’s open all night
like a shotgun wound.

& as for ya’ll tired,
                                   ya’ll poor
                                             ya’ll huddled masses
yearning to breathe free

Fuck ya’ll!

I come from a place promising
a burning cross in every yard

& two meth labs in every garage
          & when I say: meth lab

I mean golden
                        retrievers smoking crank.

The country I come from

I can flash all its gang signs
           & beatbox all their anthems.

I come from a place­­––
actually, I don’t know where I come from

I just know I woke up here.

My babies are gone.
My house was on fire.
& I couldn’t breathe.

^{—AP News headline}

The teacher remembers pulling the door
closed. She thought the door
would lock because that door
is always supposed to lock. The door
failed to lock. They say when god closes a door
the shooter will fire through the door’s

windows. At first they said she left the door
open and the shooter got through the door.
She remembers she had opened the door
to carry in supplies, propping the door
open with a rock. But she closed the door
when she heard the shooter just outside the doors.

I ran back into the building. I still had the rock in the door.
So—I opened the door—
kicked the rock—and then locked the door.
Later, they verified she had closed the door
and the door
did not lock. Later, there will be a closed-door

inquiry at the state Capitol. It’s through the closed door
that all the men with guns will enter. The classroom doors
have windows above the knobs. The glass on one door
shatters from gunfire and a man walks through the door-
frame and fires more than 100 rounds. A thin blue door
connects one classroom to another. He shot the door,

a girl in the classroom tells the 911 dispatcher. Through the door
bullets graze two officers and they retreat farther from the door.
No other men with guns will go near the classroom door
for another forty minutes. They said they needed the door’s
key from the janitor. It remains unclear if they tried the door
to see if it was locked. The girl calls again and watches the door

and covers herself in her dead friend’s blood and this is how the door
between heaven and hell cracks open. The door-
way is a thin blue line. The men with guns unlock the door
and shoot the shooter who shoots back from the closet door-
frame. The governor orders all the schools to check their doors
each week and all the doors everywhere come unhinged and every door

is a door is a door is a door is a door
is a door is a door is a door is a door
is a door is a door is a door is a door.

As if God had kicked the crutch of belief out from under
the limbs of the wounded. As if our souls were unwanted
weekend guests in the summer beach house of the body.
As if I were still the magician’s pre-pubescent assistant,
waving my skinny arm and wand. I Will Create as I Speak
the Lord once saith, in Aramaic no less-Avra Kahdabra—
distracting us with cape and hat and that sly, cunning grin.
O how I envied His deep voice and gift for misdirection.
And now my astonishment at this morning’s small miracle
when, up early and stumbling at the shore, I saw, as I fell
face down into the shallows, my sins swimming about me
like a school of minnows, no, I mean like my own fingers,
all ten of them, intertwining into a gesture of prayer.